In the winter of my fourth year of college, I had the opportunity to visit the mathematics department at the University of Hong Kong for a month to work as a research assistant. Being an international student, it was my first time outside my home country, and I was extremely impressed by the way I was welcomed and the world-class infrastructure and facilities provided by Hong Kong for scientific research. I believe that returning to Hong Kong to participate in this year’s HKLF would benefit me in two crucial ways. First, this platform would provide me the invaluable opportunity to interact and get inspired by Shaw Laureates and other distinguished researchers. Second, it would allow me to meet my peers from other disciplines from all over the world. By participating together in seminars and interacting during poster sessions, I could foster new research ideas, establish life-long connections, and form possible collaborations. Hence, I am very confident that being a part of this forum would be a major impetus for all my future academic endeavors.

My current research interests are mainly around the fields of hypergeometric functions and q-series. Hypergeometric functions are an old topic that arise in the study of almost any field in the sciences. Recently, I have been exploring the connection between Gaussian hypergeometric functions of one complex variable and the Clebsch-Gordon coefficients of the group SU(2). The study of q-series is deeply connected with the theory of integer partitions, which counts the number of ways in which a natural number can be expressed as sums of positive integers. Associated with each partition is its rank, which is the difference between the largest summand and the number of summands of the partition. Durfree symbol, introduced by Andrews, gives combinatorial interpretations of moments of partition ranks. I am currently focusing on finding arithmetic properties of these Durfee symbols, such as congruences modulo the power of an odd prime.